php strtotime “last monday” if today is monday?

Question

I want to use strtotime(\"last Monday\").

The thing is, if today IS MONDAY, what does it return? It seems to be returning the date for the monday of la

Answer 1

If today is Monday, strtotime("last Monday") will return a date 7 days in the past. Why don't you just check if today is Monday and if yes, return today's date and if not, return last week?

That would be a foolproof way of doing this.

if (date('N', time()) == 1) return date('Y-m-d');
else return date('Y-m-d', strtotime('last Monday'));

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Answer 2

$monday = strtotime('Monday last week');
$sunday = strtotime('+6 days', $monday);

Answer 3

As it was correctly outlined in the previous answer, this trick works, but also had caveats prior to PHP 5.6.22, PHP 7.0.7 and PHP 7.1-dev:

strtotime('last monday', strtotime('tomorrow'));

// or this one, which is shorter, but was buggy:
strtotime('Monday this week');

To those, who prefer the "Jedy-way", to work with objects of the DateTime class, the solution is next:

(new \DateTime())->modify('tomorrow')->modify('previous monday')->format('Y-m-d');

or even shorter notation:

\DateTime('Monday this week')

---

Be carefull, because if you do the same on SQL, you don't need to have any of these tricks in mysql with addition of "tomorrow". Here's how the solution will look:

SELECT DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL WEEKDAY(CURDATE()) DAY) as last_monday;

Answer 4

How can I make it return today's date in that case?

pseudocode:

if (today == monday)
    return today;
else
    return strtotime(...);

Btw, this trick also could work:

strtotime('last monday', strtotime('tomorrow'));

Answer 5

Late answer, but I thought I would post up this answer (which is actually from a different but related question). It handles the scenario in the question:

function last_monday($date) {
    if (!is_numeric($date))
        $date = strtotime($date);
    if (date('w', $date) == 1)
        return $date;
    else
        return strtotime(
            'last monday',
             $date
        );
}

echo date('m/d/y', last_monday('8/14/2012')); // 8/13/2012 (tuesday gives us the previous monday)
echo date('m/d/y', last_monday('8/13/2012')); // 8/13/2012 (monday throws back that day)
echo date('m/d/y', last_monday('8/12/2012')); // 8/06/2012 (sunday goes to previous week)

try it: http://codepad.org/rDAI4Scr

... or a variation that has sunday return the following day (monday) rather than the previous week, simply add a line:

 elseif (date('w', $date) == 0)
    return strtotime(
        'next monday',
         $date
    );

try it: http://codepad.org/S2NhrU2Z

You can pass it a timestamp or a string, you'll get back a timestamp

Documentation

• strtotime - http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php
• date - http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

Answer 6

Depending on exactly what you're using it for, this may be useful. Since one second's ambiguity is OK for my requirements, I use:

date( 'Y-m-d 23:59:59', strtotime( 'last sunday' ))

to get midnight on the most recent Monday (or today if today IS Monday).